Jeremy Hylton: Inconceivable

PyCon
My first Python conference was almost ten years ago, at a hotel in downtown San Jose. Guido introduced Python 1.5 that year, and Jim Hugunin introduced JPython. I ran the very first lightning talks session. Ten years later, there are still a lot of familiar...

I've been struggling with some odd corner cases of free variables and eval/exec in Python.
There is a long-standing bug report that you can't access free variables when you created a nested code block with eval or exec--for example, putting a lambda in an expression passed to eval. It works if the variable happens to be free in the text of...

Mike Verdone found a great Python bug today. It's an interaction between two features.
Name mangling. If you use an identifier with two leading underscores in a class, the name is mangled to include the name of the class as a prefix, except if the name also ends with two trailing underscores. In the class Spam, the identifier __eggs becomes...

I'm going to love Python 3000! Thomas Wouters and I implemented PEP 3104 tonight. It fixes a wart in the original nested scopes implementation that I did in 2001. In that version of nested scopes, we did not allow names defined in one function to be...